


Atelier

by Arukou



Series: Tumblr Archive the Second [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-10
Updated: 2018-06-10
Packaged: 2019-05-20 17:13:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14898653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Arukou/pseuds/Arukou
Summary: Normally, Tony's the one who holes up in his workshop for days on end, not Steve.





	Atelier

**Author's Note:**

> A while ago, there was a list of Steve/Tony tropes that made the rounds on tumblr, and one of the tropes was Steve visiting Tony to pry him out of the workshop. It made me wonder what the reverse might look like. This can be read as pre-slash or platonic. It's open to interpretation.

“Nat?”

“Yeah?”

“You seen Steve?”

Nat twisted in her chair, her expression carefully blank, and Tony suddenly knew that his hunch was right. Something had happened.

“Why are you asking?”

“I haven’t seen him in a few days. Normally I’m the one who has to be dragged out kicking and screaming into the sunlight, and he’s usually doing the dragging.”

“Aw, did no one come feed you?” She was smirking, but Tony didn’t fail to notice that she immediately held out her chocolate bar to him.

“I ate. A while ago. But that’s not why I’m up here. Where’s Steve?”

Nat sighed and set the chocolate bar aside. “He’s holed up in his studio.” The way she said it, it didn’t sound like inspiration had struck. It didn’t sound like Steve was in there making the Mona Lisa with a big fat smile on his face.

Trapped in the door frame, Tony glanced down at the tips of his socks and then back up. “Have you, is he…”

“I checked on him yesterday. He asked to be left alone.”

“Should I…”

“I don’t know,” Nat said, turning so that she could look at him more fully. “What are you planning to say?”

Tony wanted to lie. He wanted to slip on a mask and tell her he’d have Cap put on his spangly big-boy pants and come down for dinner. He wanted to make a flip remark and then run back to the workshop, except the workshop was empty and cold, and the bots were nice, but they couldn’t give hugs the way Steve could.

Instead, Tony blurted, “That I miss him.”

Nat’s gaze was piercing, but her expression wasn’t unkind. “Then you should go see him.”

Tony nodded and turned, shuffling back down the hallway toward the elevator. His stomach twisted and tightened, and he didn’t like feeling so damn exposed. Sometimes he wished he hadn’t invited the Avengers to live with him. It was hard keeping up appearances twenty-four-seven, and it had taken precious little time for them to start seeing through the cracks in his armor.

But the opposite was also true. Tony saw the chinks and nicks in his teammates he hadn’t noticed in all of Fury’s tidy little dossiers. Nat kept her lights on at night. Clint was partially deaf, and if you approached him on the side where his hearing was weak, sometimes he grabbed you in a hold without thinking. Thor had shouting nightmares about his brother. Bruce’s insomnia was bad enough to rival Tony’s, but unlike Tony, when he was exhausted, he couldn’t focus on work.

And Steve? Steve was an open wound. His temper was quick to rise, he spent hours beating on punching bags, and JARVIS had reported in more than once to say that Captain Rogers was in the stairwells, head in his hands, shoulders heaving. For a long time he wasn’t healing, and when he left for DC, Tony wondered if it wasn’t going to tear him apart completely.

And then suddenly, SHIELD fell, and it was the Avengers standing between the world and disaster, and Steve seemed to find his feet. But maybe not. Maybe his smiles—still rare, but easier than before—his confidence, his cooled temper, maybe he’d just learned how to put on armor. Like Tony.

Tony had never been to Steve’s studio before. It was a detail he’d been careful to include in the floor plan, and he’d stocked it with everything short of a block of marble. Hell, he would’ve gotten a block of marble if that was what Steve wanted, but he’d figured paints and pencils and charcoals and clays would be enough to begin with. But once it was stocked, and Steve was moved in? Tony never set foot in it.

He hesitated at the door, afraid, unsure. It felt like violating holy ground, entering Steve’s space like this. For all that Steve visited the workshop often, checking up on armor and weapons’ specs or going over weakness in battle plans, Tony never felt comfortable returning the gesture. There was just something about Steve that seemed to be for privacy, space, always space. But now Tony turned the door knob, opened the door, stepped in. He didn’t even knock.

Steve was seated in front of a large canvas, palette in hand, brush skating across already thick layers of oil paint. The scent was sharp in the room, almost more pungent than Tony’s motor oil, and it made his eyes water a little. Sunlight streamed in through the floor to ceiling windows, but somehow, it didn’t seem to touch Steve’s tight little bubble of work space. His shoulders were hunched in on themselves, and his head was bowed at an awkward angle, even as he added more black to his brush and dragged it across the canvas.

The subject of the painting was a mystery to Tony, abstract and jagged, but captivating. It froze him to the spot, with all its glacial blues and angry blacks, brought him right back to that moment with the Chitauri, gazing up into an endless abyss, his death riding his back. He blinked and sucked in a shaking breath, forcing his eyes away. He couldn’t look. Couldn’t.

“Steve?”

The sound of the brush disappeared, and though Tony wasn’t looking, he could feel Steve’s attention on him, heavy and raw.

“What are you doing here, Tony?” His voice was just as ragged as the lines he’d painted on the canvas, like maybe he’d been crying. Tony didn’t quite dare look to find out.

“I…I just…” Tony swallowed and looked up, eyes finding a spot just to the right of Steve’s ear. _Peel the armor away_ , he told himself. _Maybe what he needs is someone just as raw as him_.

“I was worried about you,” he admitted, finally looking at Steve’s face. His eyes and nose were puffy and red, his skin blotchy, the corners of his mouth turned down into sour lines. He held Tony’s gaze for a moment and then looked away, sighing and setting his palette on his work table. His hands went up to his hair, mussing it into disarray.

“I didn’t,” he paused and swallowed hard, “I didn’t mean to worry you. I just…” he gestured to the canvas, as though that would somehow explain to Tony exactly what had been eating away at him.

It suddenly struck Tony, what he could do to help. He was as emotionally stunted as the rest of them, Steve included, but maybe he could do for Steve what Steve so often did for him. “We don’t have to talk or anything. I just, I was wondering, would it be alright if I worked in here? With you? I can go if you need, but I’d like to stay. Change of environment. They say that’s good, sometimes, when you’re stuck on a problem, so…”

Steve didn’t look at him, but after a moment he nodded. “If you want. There’s nowhere else to sit, but—”

“Doesn’t matter. I’ll make do. I sit on the floor all the time.” Which was true enough. Tony settled against a wall, far from Steve but still facing the canvas. He pulled out a tablet, conscious of Steve’s gaze, and started to work on equations for arc plant outputs. After a moment, Steve bowed his head, scrubbed his face, and turned back to his canvas, taking up his paints again.

For a while, they worked in silence, Tony tapping at the tablet screen and Steve moving paint in cold, hard lines. From the corner of his eye, Tony could see Steve working, could see the stretch and flex in his arms as he moved his brush across his work. And then, between one blink and the next, the painting suddenly made sense to Tony and he shivered. There was something in the colors, in the shapes, something cold and creeping and desperately lonely. Quietly, he set aside his tablet and focused on Steve.

Steve was an exposed nerve like this, the covering he’d learned to put on during his time in DC peeled away to reveal the angry, lonely young man he’d always been. And that anger and sadness bled down his arm into his paintbrush, blooming across the canvas in thick streaks of oil, all the cracks Steve had learned to hide. It was heart-rending, but at the same time almost beautiful. This was Steve the way he was meant to be, open rather than locked away, creating rather than destroying, bright sunlight pouring down on his golden hair and his thin skin.

“Is this what it’s like for you in the workshop?” Tony asked, the words tumbling out before he could think better of them.

Steve didn’t turn, but he paused, his brush hanging mid-air.

“When you watch me work, I mean. You once said, do you remember?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I remember.”

Another moment of burning honesty between them, just before Steve left for DC, awe wrapped up in frustration. “You’re so brilliant down here. Look at the things you make! Why do you hide that away from the world?”

Steve set aside his brushes and stood from his stool, running a hand over his face before he turned to Tony. His skin had already cleared its redness, the super soldier serum hiding away any trace of tears. Quietly, he walked over and slid down next to Tony, staring at the canvas from this angle.

“I called Peggy the other day,” he said without preamble. “She thought…she thought we were on the radio. That last time. She tried…” His voice hiccuped, and he had to look away. “It just all came rushing back, you know?”

Tony looked at the canvas and once again saw the void. “Yeah. Yeah I know.” They were silent for a moment and then he cleared his throat. “This is the first time I’ve ever seen you paint. You really are good.”

“It’s nothing,” Steve quickly said, shaking his head. “Just…I had to get it out. Somehow. That moment…”

At a loss for what else he could say, Tony worked a hand over Steve’s shoulders and pulled him closer, ignoring the way his torso began to hitch, the way his breath came in short sharp gasps. They stared up at the canvas until the angle of the sun grew long, and Steve fell into silence.

“Think you’re up for some dinner?” Tony asked.

Steve nodded and rose slowly, offering Tony his hand. Together, they slipped out of the studio and down the hallway, and Tony wasn’t exactly sure he’d helped much, but he was glad he’d been there, glad he’d gone.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted [here](http://arukou-arukou.tumblr.com/post/150243049266/inspired-by-the-stony-fic-tropes-that-are-making).


End file.
